BUYERS of ebooks may have no greater legal rights than ''tenant farmers'' it has emerged following the case of a Kindle user whose digital library was wiped by Amazon.

The fine print in online agreements inserted at the behest of publishers to protect authors' copyright, licences readers to the digital files but does not grant ''tangible'' ownership, as with any hard-copy book.

These conditional ebook licences are policed and can be revoked at the discretion of the ebook retailer, as a Norwegian Kindle customer discovered when in October they allegedly violated Amazon's terms and conditions and had their digital library deleted, then reinstated.

Additionally readers are physically prevented from transferring content to friends and immediate family, or between devices, by encryption software called Digital Rights Management, devised to protect a creator's copyright from piracy and prevent buyers from on-selling the digital file for profit.

The case of ''repossession'' has been seized on by the copyright activist and Canadian science writer Cory Doctorow, who sells DRM free copies of his own books to argue for unshackled ownership of ebooks.

On his blog spot Boing Boing, Doctorow said digital licensing deals circumvented the right for books to be transferred, sold or bequeathed to another person, rendering the reader a mere ''tenant farmer''.

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Readers' limited rights are one of the major pitfalls with ebooks as sold by some retailers, according to Jon Page, president of the Australian Booksellers Association.

''This is not the first time Amazon has done something like this. They famously removed George Orwell's 1984, yes, the irony, from everybody's Kindles after they discovered they didn't have the rights to sell the ebook. People woke up one morning and it was gone from their library. This is very easy for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google to do because they force their customers to store ebook purchases in their walled garden or cloud through their devices and apps."

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Retailers like Kobo and ReadCloud make it easier for their customers to download ebook files to their home computer so the customer can keep a copy of the digital file on their own closed system, Page said.

''But it does highlight the fact that ebooks are software and that you are purchasing a licence to read … a licence that can be revoked''.

Anne Fitzgerald, professor of law at Queensland's University of Technology, says the prevailing view that digital products should be licensed rather than sold was under challenge in many legal jurisdictions.

''The inability to legally on-sell or on-distribute digital products may be something which consumers consider in determining whether to purchase a hard copy or a digital product - this will apply to books, but also to products such as CDs.''

The fantasy, science fiction and horror publisher Tor books, and the Australian digital only imprint Momentum have asked retailers to drop restrictions on readers from transferring their ebooks between devices.

Clarification: The original version of this story said that Bruce Willis had started proceedings in the US claiming he should be able to leave his digital music collection to his children. However, his wife is reported to have denied the rumour via Twitter.